Beagle's Point
by TheBiggestNoob
Summary: Strange things happen out on the Rim. Things that Change us for better or for worse.


Beagle's point.

As an explorer you always get strange looks around stations. You're an outsider and that's understandable. After you fly through deep space alone for weeks at a time seeing people is strange.

The first time I returned home from an exploration trip was extremely eye opening. Once the pressure of my ship and the station synced up I was shell shocked. First off all my sense of smell had all but vanished over my journey, my body becoming accustomed to its own odor and that of the cabin. The state was unchanged for weeks and my brain had filtered it without my noticing, all but removing the sense. Second to that was sound. Space is quiet the cabin simulates the sounds outside it to keep you from getting disoriented but I always turned that off. The only sounds are those from the ship itself, the corona of stars shaking your canopy while you scoop and the whispers and creaks of witch space. All of but the later you to which you become accustom.

When my airlock first opened I gasped at the sudden exposer and covered my face. The smell of exhaust and people. That strange freshly cut grass smell that the shield generators give off. The noise was almost unbearable. Ships coming and going, the mechanized whine of landing lifts shifting and people talking. When the platform head approached me and asked how long id be staying I was embarrassed.

I blinked at him stupidly, I was only staying a few days before I planned to head back out. I opened my mouth to speak and made a strange sound. Only then had I realized the time id spoken was before I left. He just looked at me flatly like he'd seen it a thousand times. After composing myself and answering his questions I strolled of to the cartographic office. Lucky for me the empire's stations follow all of three designs so I already knew where it was even though I'd never been to the station. Cartographics is a strange place, at least by normal people standards. All the weirdo's go here to turn in their data.

The eleven million in credits was more than worth the strange looks I got as I walked down into the bowels of the station towards Catographics. I must look like a lost puppy, jumping slightly at every sound. Explorers are a strange sort. After being planet bound and finally saving up enough to live on a station. You save more and buy your first ship. Many people are compelled to experience something larger then themselves to reach that point at all but somewhere along the line you learn that not everyone ends up chasing that urge for discover and here's why.

Space is big. When you're working towards renting your first Sidey you see people who are older then you, ahead of you in life. When I was younger I worked on a pad touching up paint jobs. When you saw an explorer leave his Asp after being on the rim for the first time it's like watching a baby being born, staring into a strange world he doesn't understand. All the newer guys including myself wanted to ask them questions. Not a single one would talk to you when you did. I understand now that they saw themselves in me, my naivety. And they understood like I do that if I followed them I would come to know. Space is big, the bubble as people call it, humanity is insignificant. Many, many people fly but only some small percentage of them explore for a living because it changes you and you see this around the stations before you ever get the chance to try it yourself. Explorers are anti-social, quiet, timid and superstitious. The longer you do it the more these traits pronounce themselves and I am no exception.

I've been exploring for years and you see things you don't understand and can't explain on the rim. Every wonder why it's called Witch space? That strange place you fly through, hyperspace? Well early in the days of hyperspace travel witch space wasn't safe. It never happened often enough to be investigated and it lessened as technology improved but ships would go missing. Pilots would vanish over simple lightyear jumps. Sometimes they would reappear later different. Sometimes ships would slip out of witch space in a system with the pilot dead from starvation, sometimes completely decomposed. These are only rumors of course but people talk about the empire covering up such things.

Now let me tell you a story now that you have some grasp.

A while ago I was attempting to circumnavigate the galaxy. I never made it, I got some three thousand lightyears past beagles point before I had an extremely disturbing experience. See unlike you normal people that rent rooms in stations to sleep and eat we explorers do so in our ships. You find a planet with about 1G, believe it or not sleeping in less than that is really bad for your back. After you land you shut down everything in your ship but your life support and sensors. This drops your power plants hydrogen consumption to about a hundredth of what it normally is and allows you to make it through the night without suffocating. This also has the added benefit of basically removing your heat signature making you undetectable.

Sometimes out on the rim you run into other people, though it's extremely rare. But if they're packing guns they can kill you for your black box with all your cartographic information, make a few million and no one would ever know. This is why you leave your sensors on. Your ship will warn you of heat signatures in the system. Many of them feature motion sensors on the outside of the ships, mine included. Now comes the fun part.

I settled down for the night on some little rock orbiting a boring class M. I think I got about. Five hours of sleep before something woke me up. It was a warning light on my console. A persistent blinking yellow light. With the holographic displays off, on the dark side of a tidally locked atmosphere less rock in the literal epitome of ass end nowhere I was shocked. That blinking yellow LED was the motion sensors tripping.

Only one thing went through my brain. It must be an SRV. Someone, somehow had found my ship. I ran naked to my console and booted the holographics up. Flinching at the icy blue light I squinted at my scanner. I was expecting one signature. I got a lot more than that. Little crawling red dots littered the holographic landscape like ants. The scanner placed a few signatures right in front of my ship. Some more were under the ship and even more on it. I looked up into the pitch blackness. The search lights popped on, extending a good few kilometers across the barren landscape but nothing was there. Could I be having an equipment failure? Icy sweat pooled up over my whole body as I struggled to comprehend what was happening. The little voice of reason began telling my body to calm down. My heart rate began slowing. A sensor malfunction wasn't cripplingly bad. But at that moment I heard a sound I'll never forget, a sound that shattered any doubt of my instruments and challenged my understanding of the limitations of extra-terrestrial life.

You don't hear much in space. But I head the clinking sound of foot on metal. How could something be out there, walking on the haul of my Asp? I was on the literal opponent end of the galaxy from civilization. On the dark side of a rock 6000 light seconds from its parent star with zero atmosphere. Leaving an SRV in EVA on a planetoid like this was suicidal, you would freeze in seconds even with the suit. How?

I'd had enough, fear was giving way to adrenaline as I stared at my scanner. I reached to my right and manually activated my systems panel. My fingertips passed through the suspended list of my ship's systems. I checked the boxes to activate them. The Asp thought about it for a few moments, giving me a much unwanted loading bar. Finally the familiar hum of my thrusters booting and reaching ideal rung through the cabin, but failed to drown out the tapping footsteps now right above my head. The ship took a second or so to run a system checklist as it always did. It felt so long.

…

Clink, clink, clink.

…

The steps paused at the new sound from the ship below it. I looked up, peering out of the top of my canopy. I couldn't see anything. It was too dark, with the light from my console polluting the outside it was impossible to see. The sickening thought arouse that if something was there it could see me and I couldn't see it.

The ships computer rudely cut through my frozen terror and alerted me that I had thrust capability. It wasn't even finished speaking when I yanked back on the stick and disabled flight assist. The Asp lurched sickeningly upward and back as the nose pitched up. A scrambling came from above me. I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Like claws on metal, probing for something to grasp onto. I didn't believe the noise until a formless black shape slapped against the very top edge of my canopy, only visible by blotting out the Milky Way behind it. I stared dumbfound at a thing, a limb. I couldn't make it out in the darkness. I instinctively hit the boost and rolled right, sending the asp into a wild vertical tumble. The thing lurched left and scratched a thin line into the nano-glass to the haul behind it. The scrambling vanished as I gained about forty meters of altitude. I mashed the key for super cruise, overrode the low altitude warning and pinned the nose on my escape vector.

My heart was pounding as I slumped backward. Gravity pressed me back into my seat as I tried to wrap my mind around what had happened. Leaning my head back I stared at the thin scratch in my canopy. A pronounced white line on the glass against the milky backdrop. The FSD countdown started and a moment later I was in super cruise.

I had no idea what the hell that was, or how it was there. I made a sharp right in my gal map and bee lined through the core towards the bubble. No one believed me when I got home. But the scratch is still there. Needless to say. Next time I slept, and every time after I left the Asp adrift in space and lived with the consequences of zero g sleep.

We explorers are a strange breed, we've seen strange things and heard strange stories. Not everyone can do what we do. We're outsiders, even to each other.


End file.
